Ex-Google Worker Fears 'Mass Atrocities' Caused by Killer Robots

The ex-Google employee has joined the campaign to stop killer robots.

| Sep 16, 2019 09:30 AM EST

Created: Sep 16, 2019 09:30 AM EST

Increasingly sophisticated killer AI robots and machines could accidentally start a war and lead to mass atrocities, an ex-Google worker has told The Guardian.

Laura Nolan resigned from Google last year in protest at being assigned to Project Maven, which was aimed at enhancing U.S. military drone technology. She has called for all unmanned autonomous weapons to be banned.

A potentially calamitous technology

AI killer robots have the potential to do “calamitous things that they were not originally programmed for,” Nolan explained to the Guardian.

She is part of a growing group of experts that are showing concern over the development of artificial intelligence programmed into war machines.

Nolan has joined the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and has spoken to UN diplomats in New York and Geneva about the great dangers of AI weaponry.

“The likelihood of a disaster is in proportion to how many of these machines will be in a particular area at once," she told the newspaper.

"What you are looking at are possible atrocities and unlawful killings even under laws of warfare, especially if hundreds or thousands of these machines are deployed."

“There could be large-scale accidents because these things will start to behave in unexpected ways. Which is why any advanced weapons systems should be subject to meaningful human control, otherwise they have to be banned because they are far too unpredictable and dangerous.”

Fatal warfare accidents

Nolan says that external circumstances, such as changing weather systems or machines being unable to properly interpret human behavior might lead to fatal accidents at a mass scale.

The ex-Google employee was brought to work on the search company's Project Maven in 2017. She became one of the company's top software engineers before resigning, as she was becoming “increasingly ethically concerned” about the work she was doing.

In 2017, Elon Musk and 116 other experts signed an open letter to the European Union calling for an outright ban of killer robots.

Last year, Google decided not to renew its contract for Project Maven. However, the technology is still being developed by governments around the world.